The almost cyclicity of the fundamental groups of positively curved manifolds

 Recall that a pure F-structure is a kind of generalized torus action. The main result asserts that if a compact positively curved manifold M ⁿ admits an invariant pure F-structure such that each orbit has positive dimension, then the fundamental group has a finite cyclic subgroup with index less than w _n , a constant depending only on n. As an application, we conclude that for all 0<δ≦1, the fundamental group of a δ-pinched n-manifold either has a cyclic subgroup with index less than w _n or has order less than w(n,δ), a constant depending only on n and δ. In particular, this substantially improves the main result inRo1]. Oblatum 1-IX-1995 & 26-I-1996